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Al Rasool mosque burning in Iran
(hexbear.net)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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Burning Mosques is a really dumb way to go about trying to overthrow the government, the west in their mindless arrogance seems to be betting everything on an increasingly shrinking minority of criminal groups and fringe freaks among Iranian society
Bad fuckin move
I heard one person say something to the effect of
Come on, burn the mosques after the revolution, doing it before is just dumb, you'll lose the religious supporters
If as a leftist state project you dont have a plan to immediately rid yourself of organised religion you don't possess pattern recognition.
As soon as you seize power you have to think about how to kill the clergy.
Edit: This is not a joke.
You should have a plan on how to neuter the clergy, but if you use organized religion to help the revolution only to clamp down violently on them - you're going to create a corrupt failed state with failed promises.
Inherently, betraying revolutionaries who helped you involves failed promises.
The people who would carry out those orders and make those plans -inherently would not hold paramount the values of the revolution. These people would also be the ones consolidating power.
The legitimacy of your new government, founded on the abandoned values of the revolution, would fall into question.
Boom. You have a government with as much strife as the Islamic Republic of Iran, and foreign powers invade, attack, and subvert you from the inside.
The global proletariat is not going to love you for an attempt to kill all clergy. They'll hate you even more if they see you openly planning to deceive them like the person @oliveoil@hexbear.net was quoting did.
Literally all successful revolutionary movements have had to eventually marginalise the clergy. The interests of a socialist project and the interests of the clergy will never align once an immediate threat has been dispatched, and the clergy has always and will always seek to snuff out the revolution, as indeed it did in Iran.
Anticlericalism is objectively the right position for the left, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro were right.
Clerics should be carefully marginalized from political power, but the way you're expressing and conceptualizing that necessity is the worst possible way to go about it when it comes to the region
If you ever in a million years want socialism to even remotely have a fringe presence in the muslim world then you best drop this nonsense quick and in a hurry
The muslim world is not the west with its slow history of secular anticlericalism born from the fractures of Christian polities, literally the ONLY THING keeping a billion muslims from hoisting the sickle and hammer is the successful Saudi-led propaganda victory that tied militant atheism to communism in the minds of practically every muslim
Exactly.
Anti-colonial, anti-western bloc of people, open to wealth redistribution - perfect for communism.
But, they are deeply religious, and western and soviet thinking on how to deal with that will result in the same defeats we have seen time and time again throughout MENA.
It's incredibly disheartening that even after all these decades, examination of WHY socialism failed so utterly in MENA still isn't given top priority, no subconsciously everyone just assumes the machiavellian supermen of the west deemed MENA socialism to fall, and it fell, just like that, cause they used religion like a pokemon, instead of clocking it was a carefully crafted subversion of proto-socialist currents within deeply religious communities
The irony is that this is one of the easiest to solve dilemmas in socialist history, an adaptation and correction that barely take 10 mins to conceive of; "capitalism is destroying Islam, politics corrupts religion", wow how difficult was that
This is an important failure too, as it contributed to the death of the USSR - ala Afghanistan.
Western Marxists can't stop being Reddit atheists. China already gave us the blueprint: keep the religion, control the clergy, liquidate those who refuse to toe the party line.
Why should socialists liquidate the Roman Catholic church when it's much more profitable to seize control of its institutions?
I don't know what the fuck your problem is, but my "western chauvinist fascist" alarms start going off whenever I see someone going all :frothing-fash:
about killing Muslims, even when "but they're religious zealots!" is the excuse. Whatever the excuse, it still disgusts me.
The most charitable guess I can hazard is to suspect you are making the very common western atheist anti-christian mistake of generalizing your experience of being oppressed by Christianity and then applying that to a completely different religious, cultural, and political context.
Shut the fuck up, take a step back, and think this shit through.
This is a clearer argument than what you said originally.
This was what you said before, which is very different from the idea that the clergy should be marginalized from political power.
The marginilisation of the clergy in a place where the clergy hold any kind of institutional power inevitably involves violence. You should always have a plan to kill the fucking priests.
So you should lie to religious people to get them on your side during the revolution and then massacre their leaders which they respect afterwards? In the context of this thread of comments, this is what you're saying - we're discussing a negative response to the statement "Come on, burn the mosques after the revolution, doing it before is just dumb, you'll lose the religious supporters".
You should absolutely let whoever wants to help you tear down the bourgeois state. and then seize on power and solidify a proletarian state. Look to your namesake on this one. Clergy participated in the February revolution, they were allowed in the soviets, and then they were marginalised by force when necessary.
A move which, famously, solved religion forever and didn't create weakpoints ripe for exploitation by their enemies.
Excessive haste in achieving Communism, demanding the masses catch up. This is another type of idealism.
they didn't purge religion hard enough
a few more decades of people growing up without religious indoctrination would've broken the ideological chain and gone a long way towards keeping it from springing back up.
What all the proreligious people fail to notice or gloss over is that it did worked. In every former and current socialist country religiousness failed dramatically, and in postsocialist countries resurgence of fascism is closely tied to resurgence of religion being used as a vessel to spread anticommunism.
Yeah dude the thing that created issues for the soviets was opportunism with regards to clergy being allowed in the soviets, not the entire institutional left siding with fascist and the germans invading.
I don't think it's good analysis to say that because the USSR marginalized clergy politically and this sometimes required force, "As soon as you seize power you have to think about how to kill the clergy."
The USSR also wasn't perfect and sometimes alienated people (especially Muslims) through excessive anti-religiousness. The revolution will look different depending on the conditions of where and when it emerges.
Exactly, this is the science of Marxism. Analyze the actual conditions and make appropriate prescriptions based on the circumstances.
Yes, I think the strategy of "lie to religious people, get into power, and kill the priests" (even if it weren't a betrayal of the peoples' trust) would not only fail in the Muslim world, but make it very difficult for another revolution to follow anywhere in the Muslim world for decades afterwards.
the science of marxism is when we look at every revolutionary movement and discard the things that worked, and embrace things that have never worked and will never work
Communism in Afghanistan fell apart and contributed to the death of the USSR.
They had a strong anti-religious stance. But they got wrecked by the Taliban.
Yes the US participated, but so did the USSR. It wasn't good enough.
They had the country, then they lost it. Now look at Afghanistan. They sell girls at the market and stone women for religious infractions.
No... part of this is true.
The Afghan government was initially state atheist, swiftly abandoning this at the behest of the soviet union in favor of secualrism, at the behest of the USSR adopted concessions to the religious right on secular reform which never satisfied them (Even after ending compulsory education of children, the largest complaint of the initial religious resistance) and they ended up losing to the Mujahideen who fractured and started a civil war. The Taliban arose during the subsequent civil war as a response to institutionalised pederasty.
The Afghan war is a pretty good case study in the fact that you can't compromise your way out of a conflict with religious authorities as a left wing project.
Ending compulsory education of children is a failure of one of Marx's 10 pillars of communism.
I agree. Don't compromise with them. Deal with them intelligently and systematically.
Chuddic brains don't respect compromise. It just means you're weak.
So in other words. Anti clericalism must be pursued immediately (Or you get Iran) and must be sustained (Because letting up on it doesn't work, as per Afghanistan).
It must be immediate, sustained, uncompromising, methodical, thorough, and strategized.
The point of the mosques and killing the clergy is a failure on the final point.
Actually, at no point should the mosques go away. I've seen secular places turn churches into libraries. You do not destroy heritage and cultural sites - a violation of international law that could easily be weaponized against you.
There are other ways of neutering religious institutions than physically taking them down. You are attacking the face of the beast and not the body.
It's like going after western media reporters but not their sponsors. You are just hitting the most visible, most replaceable, and least valuable target.
Morerover, because you are hitting the most visible target, it is much much easier to rally opponents against you.
The mythically ideal solution is one that is complete and that is unreactable.
We should have compulsory education of children everywhere, but citing a specific platform in the manifesto because Marx wrote it is not a good way to argue that.
You're going from emphatically saying killing clergy is an objective to going "violence will be necessary in some cases to politically marginalize them" like the least convincing attempt at a motte-and-bailey that I've ever seen.
Edit: Removed points that I didn't think were useful
The Orthodox clergy worked with the anti communists, they kept working with anti communists after they were marginalised, they kept doing it after they were let back in, they kept doing it for the entire rest of the lifespan of the soviet union, and they didn't stop after the union died.
The Catholic church has 100 years siding with fascism on every level on every continent and repaying every single olive branch from the left with betrayal.
And how did working with the religious powers work out for the Ba'athists and Iranian leftists?
You are eager to learn from the mistakes of maybe being a little too eager to pursue secularisation, but the greater mistake here tends more towards not being more anti religious.
I don't know how you could come up with a general formula like offing all the religious leaders, when the current conditions are that most people in MENA are quite religious.
And religiosity increases under war and poverty, the very conditions wherein the contradictions of capital break and make way for communism.
So your greatest point of opportunity coincides with the highest point of religiousity. And you want to pursue the the most heavy handed route against that population?
Read Marx. Just fucking read Marx man. The fact that religion is the opiate of the masses does not justify it holding political power nor does it remove the fact that organised religion has always ended up fucking over the left. Again, how did working with organised religion work out in Iran?
You can fail early by being too weak on religion - as per Iran.
You can fail later by being too hard on religion, drag down your allies with you, and poison-pill the Muslim world - as per Afghanistan.
The death of the USSR is why our world is so miserable and bleak today. And the Afghan failure was a domino in that. I encourage you to learn those lessons as well.
Or you can come up with a more clever, thorough, and calibrated plan than:
If you won't consider the idea that it's ever possible for an organization to be too anti-religious for a popular movement when there are many places in the world where the large majority of people are deeply religious, I don't think this discussion is going anywhere and I'm going to respectfully agree to disagree with you.
Edit: you removed the portion of your comment I actually replied to, and added the last line.
We're not discussing in a vacuum here, we're talking about someone asserting that protesters should wait until after the revolution to burn down mosques. Your response to this was that there should always be a plan to kill clergy. These assertions are not compatible with building popular movements in parts of the world where most people are religious.
With all due respect, if you totally refuse to acknowledge that the religious institutions have never worked with the revolutionary left in good faith, and have no material reason to do so, and the examples of every single revolutionary movement since the development of socialist thought aren't enough to convince you, then the problem may not be with me being too rigid.
Copying (with some edits to clarify) my edit above replying to your edit above.
Your plan should not be created immediately after the fact. You should have a plan beforehand, because it must not contradict the premise of the revolution.
If you don't manage your promises to the religious population, and you inevitably have to break them ad-hoc - then your legitimacy as a government falls into question.
"eventually marginalize" and mass murder are two very different things wtf
There is a huge difference between destroying religious authority/political organization vs burning churches and killing people for being clergy. The first one is absolutely necessary and the second is ridiculous and reactionary.
What we are taking about is claiming to have a cross-political revolution combing various religions, ethnicities, and economic outlooks (capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, etc) - only to completly fuck them over after the fact.
All this knowing full well beforehand.
The Islamic revolution that brought this government did this too by killing and purging communists. This doesn't end well.
The islamic republic is currently in charge and the communists are dead. It worked out for them.
They immediately got invaded and dragged into a war worse than the Russia Ukraine war in terms of destruction and casualties, and they struggle to this very day to keep it together.
This was caused in part by the Iranian Supreme leader calling for the overthrow of the Ba'athist government, not by the betrayal of the revolutionaries. It was not a result of the betrayal. This is... I don't know what you're trying to do here, but it doesn't seem cogent.
Okay. Recalibrating.
Based